HLS: HUSID Look-up Service

The HUSID Look-up Service (HLS) allows institutions to find the HUSID of a student who has previously been included on the
HESA Student Record. The HLS searches against a database containing the student records submitted to HESA since 1994/95.
Since the HLS is only searching against existing HESA datasets, institutions should only submit to the service students who have
studied at a HESA-reporting institution (i.e. publicly funded UK HEI) since the reporting period 1994/95.

About the HLS

The HLS searches the existing HESA database to find a student's HUSID.
The items of personal information used in the lookup need to be relatively unchanging over time, but need to provide
a key that is sufficiently unique to ensure that incorrect HUSIDs are not returned. The items chosen for the HLS are:

date of birth

surname

forenames

gender

last (HESA-returning) institution attended

The HLS requires all five items of data to ensure that the matching algorithm does not send back the wrong HUSID.
The operation of the HLS is easily broken down into 3 stages; registration, submission and response.

The HLS must be secure since HESA are providing personal information back to external users. In order to accomplish this
a registration scheme has been devised whereby an institution provides a response email address (which must be at the
institution) and HESA provides a 4 character security code which enables the service. There is no limit to the number
of users who can be registered at any institution, but all requests for registration must be made by a HESA student record
contact, or other person with suitable authority.

To register a user, please complete and submit the registration form here .

The name of the file must be in the format iiiicccc.hls where iiii is the requesting institution's 4-digit
HESA institution identifier and cccc is the 4-character HLS registration code.

The HLS request file must be in a comma-separated format. There should be no double-quoted fields and therefore no field
should itself contain a comma. The fields in the HLS Request file are as follows:

Own identifier

Optional

A field in which the institution can put their own student identifier to aid in linking to the HLS Results file.
If this field is not filled in, there must still be a comma before the following field in order to maintain the
structure of the file.

Date of Birth

Compulsory

The date of birth of the student. This field must be completed with a date in one of the following formats:
DD/MM/YYYY or DD-MM-YYYY or YYYYMMDD

The HLS response is emailed to the HLS contact at the email address quoted on the registration form.
For each record of personal information provided in the HLS request file the possible responses are:

HLS Response

Meaning

a HUSID

Successful search

DUPLICATE

A HUSID was found but it is also in use by another record with a different date of birth

NOT-FOUND

No HUSID was found that matched the personal information given

AMBIGUOUS

More than one HUSID was found that matched the personal information given and it is
not possible to determine which (if any) belong to the student in question

INVALID FORMAT

The record is not in the correct format

INVALID DOB

The date of birth given is missing or not in the correct format

INVALID SURNAME

The surname is missing or not in the correct format

INVALID FORENAMES

The forenames are missing or are not in the correct format

INVALID GENDER

The gender is missing or is not in the correct format

INVALID INSTID

The previous institution identifier is missing or is not in the correct format

The example request file (above) produces the following response file: